🇺🇸🇮🇱❌🇮🇷 — US/Israeli airstrikes struck the Yahya Abad railway bridge in the city of Kashan, Iran's Isfahan province.

🇨🇳 China is sheltered from the urea supply crunch thanks to its coal deposits

China produces ~80% of its urea from coal rather than (as most other nations do) natural gas. The method is insulating Beijing from rising nitrogen fertiliser prices.

Two German chemists patented a process to transform coal into liquid fuels. Following its discovery in 1925, the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis eventually became infamous: The Nazis used it to fuel their war machine, and apartheid South Africa turned to it to offset the impact of an oil embargo in the 1980s.

Its last — and huge — user is China.

Despite its huge progress in green energy, from electric cars to solar panels, the Asian giant consumes more coal than every other country on the planet combined.

Crucially, the Chinese coal-conversion industry is set to expand even further, potentially offsetting declines elsewhere in the country, including a reduction in coal demand to produce cement and steel. “We expect a growth between 5% and 10% in the coming years,” Carlos Fernandez Alvarez, head of coal at the IEA, tells me. Unfortunately, the sector is a black hole, as China publishes scant statistical information about it.

For decades, China has converted some of its coal into chemical products and liquid fuels in what scholars call the “traditional” coal chemical industry. The starting point was almost always metallurgical coal, converted into coke, and further transformed into ammonia-based fertilizers and acetylene-based chemicals. Yet over the last two decades, China has built a second layer, typically referred to as the “modern” coal chemical industry, based on new variations of the old Fischer-Tropsch process plus sophisticated new methods, including methanol synthesis to produce petrochemical goods, such as olefins, used in turn to make plastics.

For Beijing, the coal-conversion industry helps on two fronts.

First, it enhances energy security. China is coal-rich, and thus every ton of liquid fuel, fertilizer and petrochemicals it generates using the dirtiest fossil fuel is one that it doesn’t need to manufacture using foreign oil and natural gas. The government has long seen its reliance on imported fossil fuels as a threat to national security.

Second, it creates a new use for local coal at a time when traditional consumers — power plants, steel furnaces and cement companies — are likely to reduce demand. As the world’s largest coal miner, digging the commodity employs directly about 2 million people in China, plus many more in supporting roles, like transport.

🔗 https://archive.ph/5Vxpk